Why was Great Britain so marginalised during the Paris peace conference in 1919...

> 88
> killing innocent German civilians is ok

The complete opposite.

The occupation of the Saarland and the demilitarisation of the Rhineland were sour points leading directly to Hitler's rise. If the British and Americans were more able to control France's bloodlust, there would be no Hitler.

They would have had a revanchist movement either way. Leaving them intact was as stupid as you can see it in history books.
Especially for France, which already had a smaller pop and reproduction rate before losing one third of their Young male pop.
There was no way the french could lead another war like that, and they knew it. But the anglos would have hated seeing France dominating Europe, even though they both bled millions of their Young men on the same battlefield.

Well yeah. Wilson was the worst kind of a politician. A visionary.

Maybe another sour point was their defeat, the lies of the german army about being stabbed in the back, and the fact that Hitler lied to the germans when the french did nothing in both wars but defend themselves.
Do you realize how fucked up France was after the war? There was no white peace possible. Anglos chose the worst outcome by denying France not only rightful réparations, but making sure the germans were still angry.

> Anglos' fault
These mental gymnastics are impressive, my man.

The French, and Wilson, literally caused WW2. There's no escaping this.

Only by not being controlling enough of Germany. Those four years ofwar were a demonstration of what future wars would be like. And nothing was done to the newly formed, explicitely bellicist german nation. They should have been dismantled in the same way as austria-hungary.
Only total and utter domination (of either side, mind you) would have prevented WW2.

>visionary
No, but he was an idiot

Britain lies across the channel. France actually has to LIVE next to those stinking huns.

If I remember correctly the British also wanted Germany as a buffer state towards the soviet union. If Germany would have been dismantled or the french had occupied everything along the rhine this would have not been possible. So they prevented their allies from doing this.

Ah those poor frenchies. I think a lot of people thought the same way about the french when they were the big bully of europe.

He was definitely a visionary idiot.
Also the most educated American president. But an idiot and a filthy collectivist.

>collectivist
wat

That was Wilson's ideology and how he understood the term liberty.

Hint: just like Hegel

proof? collective security isn't the same thing as collectivism.

Real life isn't a fucking paradox game. you can't just annex a huge portion of land of people who speak a different language.

Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism

About Wilson's hatred of the US Constitution and his idea of "mature freedom" which replace individual liberty with Hegelian-Darwinian powerful state with citizens as its organic elements.

It sounds similar to the thesis of Fleming's "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I" and Bacevich's "American Empire," which are right wing thinkers. Now clearly you've read more on the subject than I have, but any book that construes Wilson as a tyrant is not a balanced account...

He was described as the only proto-fascist president which is a big statement but what is clear that he understood freedom in his own way as the right of the government to control individual liberty for the benefit of the whole society.
This thinking probably made it easy for him to introduce espionage and sedition acts.

You totally can though

One of the biggest lies of post-world war one was the idea of ethnic national states. Many redrawings of nations according to this idea did not deal with one major flaw of thought:
>Ethnic boundaries in European empires were not straight lines
>Most countries were not built to funtion on their own
Many countries had an ethnic diversity within their regions, Germans in Poland, Hungarians in Romania, Germans in Hungary etc. The implementation of the ethnic idea led to the opression of numerous important no-minorities within newly formed nations

Also, routes and industries were not evenly distributed along ethnic states. While the Czech republic had major industrial sectors as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, other parts did not. This was not a problem pre-WWI but after boarders were drawn, many countries were left isolated as farming states having to dealon a now big market of agricultural states in the region.

I wouldn't be surprised considering social darwinism was accepted by many at the time. In my readings about 20th century France and Britain I get the impression that fascism didn't succeed because the so-called liberal democracies actually adopted policies or at least shared ideas with fascist regimes. Interwar France for example was a Republic but it got more illiberal over time, with the adoption of natalist policies being the most prominent example in my mind.